Dream On

I keep a dream journal. There’s a Black n’ Red and a pen tucked down the side of my mattress and the first thing I do when I wake up is write down everything I remember. I have incredibly detailed and cinematic dreams, I have since I was a child and it wasn’t until I got older and started sharing them with others that I realized I wasn’t normal – that while I’m dreaming about evil music boxes that form a militia and I’m the only force keeping them from total world domination*, most people are dreaming about their grandma or (this kills me) don’t remember their dreams at all.

My dreams are always very complex. They have story arcs and act breaks and climaxes and cliffhangers. They are also closely tied to whatever is going on in my life: When I feel happy I might have a dream about me and my best friend strapping on vests with tiny hot air balloons attached and soaring around my neighborhood. When I feel stressed I might have a dream about my ex boyfriend and I being trapped in the unhinged car of a roller coaster that is suspended miles above the ocean and the only way to stop from careening off and plummeting to our deaths is to throw our weight around in a way that keeps it on the tracks. And when I have really acute anxiety about something, I have my recurring nightmare that someone is stalking me to kill me and we play cat and mouse until eventually the killer (always cloaked in black) corners me and I try to scream but can’t find my voice until just as he lunges to strangle or stab me (always one of those two); I’m finally able scream but it’s too late because I’m being brutally murdered. That’s a fun one for boyfriends because I wake up screaming in a cold sweat. Fortunately it’s rare and generally reserved for major life transitions, like when I’m contemplating changing jobs or moving or ending a relationship. I actually have a great appreciation for that dream because it’s a very clear knock on the head that I’m unhappy with my life and need to change things up. On a few occasions it has happened unexpectedly, which is fascinating-slash-alarming because then I have to go on a psychological witch-hunt to identify what’s bothering me so that the nightmares will stop. Good times!

Sometimes I dream in other languages. If I’ve been reminiscing about Peace Corps, I’ll dream in Arabic that night, which I love because I don’t really remember any Arabic so as soon as I wake up I jot down all the vocabulary I can recall. The other day I downloaded the Wunderlist app for my Iphone and just for kicks I decided to navigate all the settings and features in French. Right on schedule, that night I dreamed in French that I was the headmaster at a prestigious boarding school nestled among lavender fields and there was a visiting headmaster who wanted to observe the school to get ideas for his own up the road and I wanted to run him off because he was my competition but also I was secretly in love with him.

Like the French boarding school, most of my dreams are purely entertaining. Like the one I had a couple weeks ago where I was on a guided tour of Buckingham Palace and I got separated from the group and Prince William struck up a conversation with me and before I knew it we were having a clandestine affair but I was also staying at the palace as a guest of the Royal Family, playing tennis and acting like everything was normal. I felt so ashamed about it until Kate Middleton took me aside and told me she knew about the affair and that it was fine, that everyone in Europe has mistresses and that she was glad Prince William had chosen me because she really liked me and enjoyed my company. This dream is a little disappointing because I don’t find Prince William the slightest bit attractive but it’s nice to know that my brain is comfortable justifying extra-marital affairs.

In the words of my father, after I described a dream over the breakfast table in 8^th grade: “Jeepers. Even in sleep you have a flair for the dramatic.”

I go through phases logging my dreams. I haven’t done it for years but I started up again last January because I was experiencing a really damaging artistic block and I hoped that recording my dreams might harness the creative juices that were flowing while I slept. At the time I thought they could be the catalyst for a screenplay or a character study or some short stories but after 10 months of steady tracking they have established themselves as nothing more than deeply bizarre snapshots of my psyche so now I mostly record them so that if I die suddenly in a car crash, my friends and family, entrenched in a grief that only wants to remember me as vibrant and beautiful, will have something tangible to remind them what a loon I was.

And now you can, too! I’ve decided to open up my dream journal to you so you can enjoy the inner workings of my cracked-out subconscious. Instead of revisiting dreams I’ve already had, we’ll start fresh together and I’ll report the most interesting ones to you as I digest them. So none to talk about yet, since the clock starts with this post but I’m sure there will be some doozies as the holidays draw near. Sweet dreams!

*All the dreams I mention are real. This one occurred in high school the night before my AP English exam.